Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>
> But I think I have a rather good feel for these things, and I have
> been especially impressed with the Germans for doing some great
> work in digitization, but they don't seem to bring it together
> very well.
The new plan, as released yesterday, also envisions bringing
together some 30.000 (!) cultural and scientific institutions
and their digital resources as already in existence. This may well
be the most promising part of it.
A lot of stuff, OTOH, has already been brought together in
our union catalogs, the largest being the GBV catalog:
http://gso.gbv.de/xslt/DB=2.1/LNG=EN/
It comprises 63 mio catalog entries from 400 libraries, and includes
metadata for all digitized titles done in these institutions, as well as
some 90.000 dissertations in digital formats and lots more.
What's missing there is full text searching. Once you have good scans,
as we generally do, OCR'ing is technically feasible any time, and
the project might well focus on this first.
But not all resources would require that. For instance, our large
collection of children's books or another collection of architectural
drawings can well do without that, but both need good metadata. Some 770
Titles are already accessible and findable via our catalog:
http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/kinderbuch.html
In this way, much has been done already in smaller projects all over
Europe with special attention to the materials in focus, rather than in
one giant project focussed on nothing in particular but numbers.
And don't forget the National Library in Frankfurt; they are primarily
the place for legal deposits which now (since 2004) include digital
documents as well if published in Germany.
So, a portal needs to be created that covers as much of it as possible
in one search tool. Whether Europeana as it is now can be the platform,
I don't know.
B.Eversberg
Received on Thu Dec 03 2009 - 06:12:04 EST